High-fidelity Breath-hold Liver DWI Through Self-referenced and Collaborative PROPELLER-EPI Reconstruction Based on POCSMUSE (SCOPUSE)

Motivation: Diffusion-weighted PROPELLER-EPI (periodically rotated overlapping parallel lines with enhanced reconstruction using EPI as signal readout) can enable high-fidelity free-breathing liver DWI. Goal(s): It is challenging to acquire liver DW-PROPELLER-EPI with breath hold for improving the acquisition efficiency. Approach: In this study, we proposed a self-referenced and collaborative PROPELLER-EPI reconstruction based on POCSMUSE (SCOPUSE) framework that can 1) correct the Nyquist ghost phase errors, 2) minimize the streaking artifacts, and 3) enable breath hold for liver DWI. Results: This method can accelerate the acquisition of DW-PROPELLER-EPI data and provide improved image quality compared with conventional PROPELLER-EPI reconstruction pipeline. Impact: Breath-hold acquisition can reduce the respiratory artifact in liver DWI with high scan efficiency, however, the attainable image quality is often limited by the breath-hold time. The proposed SCOPUSE can enable breath-hold liver DW-PROPELLER-EPI acquisition for achieving high-fidelity liver DWI.